New York, NY, June 18, 2009 - A new report on search engine marketing from [x+1], the leader in predictive marketing, found that while organizations are investing in SEM despite the down economy, they have been unhappy to date with the performance.

Among the report’s key findings:

Nearly two-thirds of respondents -- 65.4% -- said they would spend the same or more on SEM in 2009 than in 2008, with 13.1% looking to increase spending by more than 20%.

Almost half 48.6% said the economy had no impact on their SEM budget.

Most respondents (59.8%) said they are using SEM to drive leads more effectively, another 16.8% said they were using it to reduce the overall marketing budget.

More than half (57%) gave SEM performance in their organization a low ranking (1 or 2 on a scale of 1 to 7). Only 20% gave it a high rating (6 or 7).

15.9% said they had not noticed a big difference in conversion rates through use of SEM; only 10.3% said they consistently saw lift rates above 20%.

Less than one-quarter (21%) were satisfied or very satisfied with their company’s ability to optimize sites for 30-100 keywords and redirect searchers to dynamically created landing pages; 42% were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied.

Only 23% were satisfied or very satisfied with their ability to continuously improve the performance of their landing pages in response to keyword searches.

It seems to me that most of the folks who are selling SEM services through webmaster forums like NetBuilders are ignoring the much larger and better paying market for their services -- brick and mortar businesses.

Those guys are spending money on SEM services and they need a lot of help in doing so. The study results above show that they are unhappy with their current vendors, which means that they are likely to be receptive to new vendors.

SEM services tend to be sold very cheaply when they are sold to other webmasters. Brick and mortar business pay higher rates for the same services.